BOUNDS ON THE EFFECTIVE THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY OF CELLULAR CERAMICS: A NEW APPROACH

In this paper, the two thermal circuit models are used to predict the effective thermal conductivity of cellular ceramics. The results are compared with the threedimensional numerical model and also with experimental data available in the literature. Although it has been suggested that the parallel and series models represent the upper and lower bounds on the effective thermal conductivity, it is shown that the two thermal circuit models proposed in this paper can illustrate the limits more accurately. A weighting factor is defined which can be used to estimate the effective thermal conductivity of cellular ceramics precisely.